Monday, September 21, 2015

Saints fans and their prepostrophes

Even controlling for the fact that "Who Dat" is a grammatical travesty on multiple levels, most comments I've ever seen on any Saints thread, anywhere, are terrible, even when non-Saints comments around them aren't.

I won't cite specific comments, because they're easy enough to find. Granted, not everyone is a grammar maven, and even fewer are particularly inclined to give it their all on an online comment. But there is none — zero — excuse for quite possibly the stupidest mistake I've ever seen. And I've seen it over and over and over:

Bree's

Ugh.

Even as a small boy, not yet particularly adept at the conventions of English, I bristled at people using unnecessary apostrophes on any word that ended in S. That was like the first thing I ever knew to be grammatically wrong. Granted, it's an understandable error in some instances, when the sometimes-arbitrary Possessive Police flashes its badges. (See what I did with "it's" and "its" there?) But we're not talking about the common, mildly geeky mistakes. Brees is the man's name. Almost never is anyone referring to anything possessive (which would be Brees' ball, etc., anyhow). Perhaps one day, Drew and Brittany will sire a child named Bree, and that child will own a toy that we will talk about. Then it will be OK.

Until then, there is literally no reason for "Bree's" to exist in these conversations apart from the flawed thought process that every word ending in the letter S needs an apostrophe. So, please, stop it, people! It's Brees. Not only does spelling it that way make you look smart, it's also less to type. To inversely paraphrase the Saints' current record, it's a win-win!